Citeseer is down at the moment so I can't find the paper on the big hurdles any given visual programming language has to deal with.
I've used LabView a little, wrote the backend code for a startup that was trying to create an ambitious visual language and have a friend doing a Phd in the field (which is where I got the paper reference from).
The biggest problem I've found - and it's on the list of problems from the paper - is that there's a mental cost associated with the layout and wiring in 2D. It starts off as fairly negligible but eventually becomes a huge monkey on your back. An auto-layout feature can alleviate that, but then you've got to keep track of where everything is.
Some people seem to be immune to this, so I guess the proportion of people effected (along with the average size of a logical unit in the language - function, module, program, etc) might in turn effects the potential of a visual language to get mindshare.
Talking to a number of people who've used / written / studied them about this problem over a couple of beers the best solution we've come up with is to have a visual language for beginners and a textual dataflow language for the more advanced users, and the ability to convert between the two for the people making the transition.
I've used LabView a little, wrote the backend code for a startup that was trying to create an ambitious visual language and have a friend doing a Phd in the field (which is where I got the paper reference from).
The biggest problem I've found - and it's on the list of problems from the paper - is that there's a mental cost associated with the layout and wiring in 2D. It starts off as fairly negligible but eventually becomes a huge monkey on your back. An auto-layout feature can alleviate that, but then you've got to keep track of where everything is.
Some people seem to be immune to this, so I guess the proportion of people effected (along with the average size of a logical unit in the language - function, module, program, etc) might in turn effects the potential of a visual language to get mindshare.
Talking to a number of people who've used / written / studied them about this problem over a couple of beers the best solution we've come up with is to have a visual language for beginners and a textual dataflow language for the more advanced users, and the ability to convert between the two for the people making the transition.
Thoughts?